Are you able to create a svg file from a blank slate, add some things, save it and then re-open it? Does this affect all svg's saved by inkscape or just this modified one? Are other svg capable programs able to open the original svg?
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CalebJul 19 '11 at 12:34

@Caled: yes i can make new svg and open them. It affects this file only. Other programs are unable to open the affected files.
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BenjaminJul 19 '11 at 12:46

Can you open the original SVG in Inkscape and do a save-as to a new file without making any modifications and then open it?
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CalebJul 19 '11 at 12:50

That's what I did in the first place. It doesn't work. I tried to save as plain svg too, but that was vain too. I am now trying to copy the content of the original map into a new plain file.
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BenjaminJul 19 '11 at 12:56

OK so far copying the items from the original to a new blank file seems to be a good work-around. But that doesn't tell me why copying and modifying the original fails to load. :\
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BenjaminJul 19 '11 at 13:09

2 Answers
2

Based on your comments, I would suggest that there is some combination of corruption in the original svg file and possibly a bug in Inkscape. When opening the file it is able to compensate and display, but it hasn't really understood everything or corrected the mistake and saving causes this discrepancy to tun into outright corruption. Obviously this should not happen, and if the original svg is really from WikiCommons and thus not private, I would suggest you post it on the Inkscape issue tracker.

The copy/paste work around probably works because it forces it to examine and re-write each object and whatever object is correct is likely getting dropped entirely.

The problem may be bad handling of character encoding, it sounds like it. The workaround is to manually edit the file ( I use Kate, but any editor with a search functions will do) as suggested in the bug report.

I simply deleted the xpacket elements, and the file opened again.
Remember an element is <element>text</element> if you are not used to working with XML or markup languages. If that doesn't work, I'd try changing the character encoding as suggested in the bug report.